Robust Transmission Design for RIS-aided Wireless Communication with Both Imperfect CSI and Transceiver Hardware Impairments

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has recently been regarded as a potential technique to enhance the performance of wireless communication systems by creating additional communication links. However, it is almost impossible to get the perfect channel state information (CSI) from the base station (BS) to the Internet of Things devices (IoTDs) and the RISrelated channels. Furthermore, residual transceiver hardware impairments inevitably affect the performance of wireless communication systems. Hence, we study the robust design for an RIS-aided wireless communication system based on the imperfect CSI and hardware impairments. Minimizing the power consumption of BS is formulated by ensuring the minimum signalto-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) demands of the IoTDs and the unit modulus constraints of the RIS. Specifically, after approximating the non-convex constraints by using S-procedure and the successive convex approximation (SCA) methods, we adopt the block coordinate descent (BCD) technique to iteratively optimize one set of variables while keeping the others variables fixed in various channel uncertainty scenarios. Simulation results demonstrate that the influence of transceiver hardware impairments can be effectively decreased by deploying RIS even with channel uncertainty, which is more advantageous than increasing the number of BS's antennas.